Sam Smith covered Washington under nine presidents, edited the Progressive Review for over 50 years, wrote four books, helped to start six organizations including the national Green Party, the DC Humanities Council and the DC Statehood Party, and played in jazz bands for four decades

Obama’s unpaid parking tickets

In 2007 the Progressive Review was one of a tiny number of publications who reported this:

Somerville News, MA 2007 – Before Barack Obama was a United States senator and a presidential hopeful, he was a Harvard University law student living in Somerville who parked in bus stops and accumulated hundreds of dollars in parking tickets. And for nearly two decades those parking tickets went unpaid, until a representative of Obama’s settled all his outstanding debts with Cambridge’s Traffic, Parking and Transportation Department Jan. 26.

Obama attended Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991. During his time at Harvard, Obama lived at 365 Broadway in Somerville, according to his parking tickets. Records from the Cambridge Traffic, Parking and Transportation office show that between Oct. 5, 1988 and Jan. 12, 1990 Obama was cited for 17 traffic violations, sometimes committing two in the same day. The abuses included parking in a resident permit area, parking in a bus stop and failing to pay the meter. Twelve of Obama’s 17 tickets were given to him on Massachusetts Avenue.

In one eight day stretch in 1988, Obama was cited seven times for parking violations and was fined $45. Thirteen of the 17 violations occurred within one month in 1988.

Obama’s disobedience of the rules of the road earned him $140 in fines from the City of Cambridge. The tickets went unpaid for over 17 years and $260 in late fees were added to the tab. On Jan. 26, the fines and late fees were paid in full. The final tally for Obama’s parking breaches was $400, according to Cambridge Traffic, Parking and Transportation.

Obama spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said the presidential candidate’s parking violations were not relevant. “He didn’t owe that much and what he did owe, he paid,” Psaki said. “Many people have parking tickets and late fees. All the parking tickets and late fees were paid in full.”

Psaki declined to comment further. She refused to say how the fines went unpaid so long and what prompted Obama to finally pay them.

Sam Smith, 2007 – If I just found out that one of my friends had left 17 parking tickets in Somerville, Massachusetts unpaid nearly two decades it would not lessen my affection towards that friend. As has been said, a friend is one who knows your faults and doesn’t give a damn.

If I found that someone had accumulated the parking tickets shortly before becoming president of the Harvard Law Review I would have been smugly amused by the confirmatory evidence for my assumptions about that institution.

If the offender had run for State Senate of Illinois from a Chicago district, I would have probably supported him since the violations were in the lower range of offenses generally associated with that post.

But what if the offender had an repetitive tendency to write things in books and speeches like the following?

“Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting ‘preachy’ may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in addressing some of our most urgent social problems.”

Or as the violator put it down in Selma just the other day:

“One of the signature aspects of the civil rights movement was the degree of discipline and fortitude that was instilled in all the people who participated. Imagine young people, 16, 17, 20, 21, backs straight, eyes clear, suit and tie, sitting down at a lunch counter knowing somebody is going to spill milk on you but you have the discipline to understand that you are not going to retaliate because in showing the world how disciplined we were as a people, we were able to win over the conscience of the nation. I can’t say for certain that we have instilled that same sense of moral clarity and purpose in this generation.”

I tend not to follow the moral reiterations of people with 17 unpaid parking tickets, especially one who seems to have abruptly stopped accumulating them once the Harvard Law Review presidency was in view and didn’t bother paying them until a still higher presidency was in sight.

There is a bit of arrogance, contempt and self indulgence lurking behind such behavior. One unpaid ticket is a messy desk, two is a messy schedule, three a messy life, but 17 suggests a certain philosophical indifference to the law or other psychological flaw.

Not that all fines should be paid. For example, just 14 miles down the road from Somerville is Concord, Massachusetts, where in July of 1846 Henry David Thoreau was arrested by Constable Samuel Staples for failure to pay the poll tax, a dramatic, albeit admittedly unpreachy, statement in opposition to slavery. A veiled woman, perhaps his aunt, arrived to pay his fine but Thoreau refused to leave. Then, according to Wendy McEloy:

“According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, ‘Henry, what are you doing in there?’ Thoreau replied, ‘Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?’ Emerson was ‘out there’ because he believed it was shortsighted to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of spirituality.”

In the present instance, the 17 unpaid Somerville parking tickets have resulted in neither jail nor are they likely – despite the offender’s best desires – to result in an entire rebirth of spirituality. Instead, they stand as a reminder of the sometimes subtle, sometimes simple, accord we strike with each other in order to live in the same town. And how some observe this accord and others think they are too clever or too important to bother.

It is a small matter that becomes somewhat more significant when one thinks about the past six years under a president who has routinely ignored the laws of the United States in order to satisfy his egoistic and psychotic needs. Many of these violations have their roots in behavior and attitudes learned as a young man, including at college.

It’s not an insurmountable problem but it doesn’t help much when your media representative declares the issue not relevant. After all, as they say: deceive me once, shame on thee. . . Deceive me, the Traffic, Parking and Transportation Department, the Democratic Party, the media and the voters 17 times until your consultants tell you better pay up, shame on all of us.